


Nocturne

by Lafayette1777



Category: Voyná i mir | War and Peace - Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (TV 2016)
Genre: F/M, Gen, Missing Scene, Moscow, Self-Indulgent, bald hills, basically just a vignette, between natasha and pierre getting married and marya and nikolai getting married, i love marya and i like to see her happy and fulfilled, it's all rather innocent and saccharine, thats why this exists
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-05
Updated: 2018-07-05
Packaged: 2019-06-05 19:51:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,469
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15178094
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lafayette1777/pseuds/Lafayette1777
Summary: The problem is this:Nikolai still hasn’t quite figured out how to sleep like he used to.





	Nocturne

**Author's Note:**

> I would die for marya, and for some reason I find nikolai’s consistent and plain self-interest as charming as it is boorish. Here they are.

The problem is this: 

Nikolai still hasn’t quite figured out how to sleep like he used to.

The first three nights at Bald Hills they all stay up late talking into the wee hours of the morning, leaving him feeling loose and warm and sure in a way he hasn’t in so long, not since coming back from active duty. Those last few days in Paris; like a dream, now. He’d come home to an unrecognizable life. 

It’s just the four of them, most of the time—Pierre and Natasha, freshly married, and he and Marya, soon to be the same. There’s so much to talk about, to drink about, to laugh about. By the fourth night, though, they’re worn out; they migrate towards bed before midnight. He kisses them all good night, trots up to the rooms bequeathed to him for the week. Undresses, slides beneath the sheets, stares at the ceiling. The play of shadows across the plaster creates an incomprehensible spirograph; he dwells on it, rather than letting anything else enter his mind. 

It’s a futile attempt. He gets up, again, and paces the room, then finds himself heading back down the stairs into the soupy warm light of a candle left burning in the drawing room they’d all sat in after dinner. His shoulder aches. An old, phantom pain; he presses down on it, experimentally, and is suddenly shoved back onto a smoke-filled field, his ears ringing, every exposed scrap of skin blanketed with blood and dirt. He barely hears his own gasp. 

Over the roar of his heartbeat, he doesn’t hear the footsteps either. 

“Nikolai?” Marya’s voice is quiet. She’s looking at him cautiously; her head tilted. 

He takes a deep breath, tries for a smile. “Can’t sleep either?”

Her expression clears into affection. “I was thinking a cup of tea might help.”

Once his nerves are no longer firing away into nothing, he realizes they’re both shades of indecent. Clad in bedclothes, alone in the inky center of night. Natasha and Pierre’s presence is supposed to prevent moments like this. Regardless, he should be gracefully excusing himself by now, slipping back into a role closer to appropriate. 

He doesn’t.

Marya pads silently forward, then dips down to sit in the seat across from him. The lone candle is burning low, barely able to illuminate the shape of her beyond her face. She leans toward him. “It’s something about the night that makes it worse,” she says. “I think about my father and Andrei and everything that’s happened all the more.”

He lets out a hum of agreement. This is a conversation he wants to have, he realizes, even if the words he wants to say seem obfuscated behind a layer of stress, of grief, of the utter chaos of his recent life. It’s a conversation he can never imagine having had with Sonya. 

Her eyes pan down to where he’s still kneading tentatively at his shoulder. “Something hurt?”

“Old wound,” he replies, feeling unexpectedly vulnerable beneath her luminous gaze. “Thought I’d walked it off a long time ago.”

She stands, again, and he does too. In the delicate pool of light around them, they inch closer. After a moment, he feels her hand come to rest above the wound, the warmth of her palm seeping through the thin fabric of shirt. “I guess these things don’t ever really go away,” she murmurs. 

He puts a hand over hers. “I suppose not.”

Their sudden proximity is almost overwhelming, sensory overload in the softest hour of the night. They both lean in at the same moment. One gentle, haphazard kiss, and then he lays his head on her shoulder. Her arm comes up to encircle his neck, pulling them flush against each other. He’s gone so long without touch, without touch like this, that he could weep at the abrupt tenderness of it. 

But when they eventually separate, the tears are in Marya’s eyes instead. 

“I never thought—” she begins, then silences herself by pulling him into a kiss. A real one, now. The kind you’d go to war to keep alive.

The kind you’d wait for, if you had to. 

 

 

There are arrangements to be made in Moscow, where Sonya and the Countess are packing up the flat for the move to Bald Hills after the wedding. Or, rather, Sonya is managing the operation and the Countess makes the occasional unreasonable demand. Before he’d left for the country—a trip he’d engineered for the sake of his sanity—he’d been on the edge of snapping something loutish at his mother. Or contemplating too long his broken vow to Sonya, which doesn’t generate regret so much as a vague combination of dishonor and discomfort. When Pierre and Natasha said they would chaperone a visit to where Marya had spent the last few weeks supervising a renovation of Bald Hills, it had felt as euphoric as rebirth. 

But they could only a spare a week, and it wasn’t enough. He’d known it wouldn’t be, but now that he’s standing on the steps outside the house, holding one of Marya’s hands in both of his own, the truth of it is unavoidable. 

“Soon,” she says, looking down at their gloved hands, her voice brittle.

“Soon,” he agrees. He spares a glance over his shoulder, finds Natasha and Pierre preoccupied with climbing into the carriage, and slips in a brief kiss to Marya’s cheek. He wouldn’t blush, but she does and somehow it spreads to him; the redness hasn’t left his cheeks even after he climbs in next to Natasha, even after they’ve gone around the bend in the road and the manor fades from view. 

After a long stretch of silence, he feels Natasha’s eyes on him. 

“What?” he asks, nudging her with his shoulder. 

For a moment, she just smiles fondly at him. Then: “All the light left your eyes as soon you lost sight of her, Nikolushka.”

“That’s awfully sentimental,” he says.

“And trite,” she replies, smile widening. “As are all good things.”

There’s still too much swishing around inside his head— more than there ever was before, when his father and Petya were alive and he loved Sonya because she was in front of him and he knew, more or less, the kind of life he would have until he had no life left in him at all. Before everything was upended, before his old arm wound began to ache from the anxiety of fixing the mess the family is still climbing out of. Natasha has become even more of a confidante than she already had been; she alone is who he comes to for advice, for comfort, for any semblance of stability. She alone can stop him second-guessing himself into oblivion while he tries to get a hold of the mayhem. Misfortune has grounded both of them, stretched them into adulthood, but she’s navigated it with considerably more grace than he has. 

Now, coming out of the tunnel and back into the light, her eyes still gleam with a wisdom he can’t quite fathom. 

“We’ll still see each other, won’t we?” he asks. “Once I’m married, I mean. We’ll still visit with each other.”

“Of course,” she replies, giving him a curious look. “Why on earth would we not?”

“It’s just—” He takes a deep breath. “A lot of sudden change.”

“Too good to be true?”

“Too good,” he says. There’s a little melancholy in his voice. Sourceless. “But true.”

 

 

After the wedding, the night comes for them again.

A lantern hangs from the ceiling of the carriage, metal grinding on metal producing a squeak barely audible over the wooden groans of the wheels across uneven dirt. The pool of light cast by the flame tilts back and forth over the upholstery. The ride to Bald Hills is long enough that they’ve told the driver to push through the night, anticipation getting the best of them. The need to be in a home of their own, as one rather than two, as a beginning rather than an end. 

She’s spent the afternoon dozing against his shoulder, their fingers entwined. Nikolai has not slept at all, as far as she can tell. He doesn’t seem to spend much time doing that, which will be something to work on. She has a healthy appreciation for hardship; it grants her steadiness. For now, though, she’s happy to feel him close to her in the dark. A closer warmth than she’s ever known. 

“How much longer?” Nikolai asks the driver, voice cutting through the tepid dark. 

The driver ruminates. “Soon.”

Nikolai scoffs at his imprecision, but Marya looks at him until he smiles down at her, lit in shades of orange by the lantern. A painting in soft focus. 

“Soon,” she whispers. The wait is nearly over.

**Author's Note:**

> lafayette1777.tumblr.com
> 
> I'm the only person I know whose read this book so yall gotta come talk to me about it!!


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